Tracy Kidder, media pundits, and the academe

This chapter critically examines how Tracy Kidder's story The Soul of a New Machine was received over the past three decades by the academic community as against the non-academic media punditocracy. Bruno Latour, upon examining Tracy Kidder's story, observes that the heroic tale of engineers who worked on Eagle, a 32-bit minicomputer, was actually inspired by a machine! Over the years, however, this Latourian viewpoint seems to have been ignored. The chapter exposes how these two different viewpoints of the story reinforce the assumptions about how we approach narratives about technology. The arguments indicate that non-academic reviews focused largely on heroism, whereas in the academy, the story was approached in light of the prevailing academic discourses in management theory per any given decade of the book's journey, thus making the Latourian viewpoint an important voice of reason